Drawer slides are expensive. Make wood slides

drawer Hardware is expensive I’m going to show you how I saved $1,300 by making

super simple cabinets without any hardware and they look good too I’ll also reveal the secret to hunting down

the best plywood without getting ripped off this episode of wit works is sponsored by Simply Safe the game plan

wait wrong Channel this is the design my friend Steve and I came up with now the requirements for this build were simple

one I needed at least 10 ft of storage B I want the storage to look good Roman

numeral 3 I want the drawers to be standardized so they can move around as my needs change they also need to be

easy to build and lastly here’s the big one they need to be affordable now I priced out several drawer slide options

and the most expensive was $1,300 for 36 sets and the least expensive was $900 so

here’s the challenge for this build I’m going to try to build this 10ft wall of cabinets for less than the price of

drawer Hardware alone now it will be tight but I think I might be able to pull it

off since my big table saw is still on the injured reserve list after taking an

unplanned bath I’m going to be making these cabinets using a track saw 95% of

the time now this is good for you because it gives me the chance to share with you three brilliant tips and tricks

that I’ve come across that will help improve any project that you do with plywood this first one is from Jason Ben

so go unsubscribe from his channel if you haven’t already before you make any Cuts you want to deal with the factory

Edge which is most likely damaged it’s really easy you just line up your track

about 3 mm off the factory Edge and you make your first cut after that all of your Cuts will be referencing this clean

Edge and I admit this is the first time that I’ve actually done this in a project before because I’m usually in a

rush to just get going and I’m embarrassed that I haven’t adopted this sooner doing this ensured that all of my

cuts were perfect you using this high quality plywood second tip is this use

parallel guides they make things faster and easier I would see people using these and for the longest time I didn’t

understand what the advantage was and so if that’s you let me explain it’s like having a table saw fence in your hand

for your track saw with these flip stops you can set your desired width reference one edge of the piece and without

marking or measuring you can make repeated Cuts just like you would at the table saw I was able to cut down a sheet

plywood in a matter of minutes accurately because of a well planned cut list and these parallel guides the third

tip is closely related and that’s if you have parallel guides you don’t have to have a really long track that is the

length of your material you can get by with just a standard 55 in track you can shimmy your track down the other half of

the length after your first cut and since you’re referencing the same Edge you get a perfect cut every time now

I’ve never seen anyone do this or talk about it so this is me attempting to take credit credit for the idea but we

all know that someone else thought of it first now while I was working my wife came out and told me that it might rain

and that it would probably be a good idea to bring the wood in my table saw inside when I looked at the forecast it

said no rain and so we got in a slight argument about who was right and I won

and left the plywood outside 20 minutes later just as I finished celebrating my victory I noticed this

garbage 60% of the time she’s right every

time speaking of losing battles before I show you how to assemble the cabinet and drawers we need to go back in time to

when I tried to buy good plywood for this project the price oh my word the

best sheet of plywood I could find was $79 and it still had its voids and

issues all right that’s not ideal the problem is I need plywood today tomorrow

at the latest I don’t want to pay $80 for Junk I just want good quality

plywood so I’m going to try that other store maybe we’ll get lucky so I drove across a street to the Blue Store turns

out the price of garbage is also $79 there so that was a waste of time in my

last City I found a small company that deals directly to professional cabin

makers plywood I got there was usually half the price of what I could find at a

big box store and two or three times s the quality I’m in the DFW area now I’m

going to try to find one of those places don’t think I’m going to be able to find one right off the bat so I’m just going

to Google plywood company in Fort Worth and maybe that’ll be a good start I

literally Googled plywood company in Fort Worth and found this company called

not kidding plywood company of Fort Worth I kind of thought it could be an internet scam until I showed up and sure

enough that’s the name of the company all right I just peaked inside

and it looks like a professional showroom I’m a little nervous that they only sell to professionals and they

wouldn’t sell to a regular guy like me just in case that happens I brought along a secret weapon that is foolproof

that when they see it they will welcome me in and sell to anybody at both pricing let’s try it out now I was kind

of scared but with this solid strategy I walked into the showroom met this guy standing guard and after an awkward

steering contest I said the secret password and

this happened come on in now this place has it all they even have plywood made from

mappa Burl I thought about making my cabinets from it until I saw that it was

$1,500 a sheet now since I don’t have jackary battery sponsor money I decided to move on and when I got past the

showroom I found a helicopter posing as a fan the biggest and cleanest aisles

I’ve ever seen in a lumber yard Walnut at every turn here here and here and I

finally found some solid plywood options to test out now the first sheet that I bought to test out was $40 I wanted to

see if it would work and I bought another higher grade for 80 just to see if there’s a difference I bought some of

each to compare to see if I can get away with using a $40 option in the future don’t you hate it when YouTubers are

lazy and default to that tired and worn SpongeBob transition yeah that’s the worst the

next day now the coolest part of all this is since I bought more than $450 worth of plywood MDF and black laminate

they delivered my order to me the next day for free even though I live 40

minutes

away and here’s all the the parts that you need to make one cabinet you don’t need to waste plywood building a top or

a bottom you just need 3in stretchers and one of the stretchers on the bottom

will be slightly bigger because of the toe kick we’ll talk more about the toe kick in a little bit but right here you

can see this is really what makes up each cabinet now on the bottom I’m gluing on a spacer just so that the

bottom drawer doesn’t ride on the very very bottom and sometimes that plywood

wants to bend when you cut it free so this is how you fix that now a lot of people building this cabinet would

probably cut Doos in the sides of these cabinets using either a data blade on the table saw or some type of router bit

I’ve done that before and I don’t like doing it for a couple of reasons first it makes a lot of sawdust it’s loud it

makes a mess inevitably I mess it up but most importantly it weakens the sides of

the cabinet and that’s what happened at my last shop now if you’re a beginner or even an intermediate woodworker building

a cab cinet seems like it’s Out Of Reach and it’s very intimidating but this

design is so easy you don’t need a whole lot of special tools um the one trick is

is there is some intricate math involved if you want standardized drawers that can move around the good news is is we

made all of these in a plan that you can download immediately and if you want to build this or hack this and modify it

for your needs this is super easy I can’t imagine spending $120 per cabinet

on draw Hardware go check it out now that first cabinet you saw me building was the Prototype just to work at all

the math and once I got that squared away I was able to build all the other cabinets really quickly and I was eager

to line them up to get a glimpse in person on what my new cabinets would look like in space now here’s how I made

that jig I ripped a piece of plywood that was the exact thickness of my spacing and I just glued a reference

piece 90° after that I glued another piece of scrap on the top of and bottom

to reference the front edge of where the false fronts would be I wasn’t sure if this jig would be square and accurate

but I did all of the remaining five cabinets using this and they were perfect every time it’s also really

satisfying making a little jig like this on the Fly and at work and if you wanted to make cabinets like this you could

stack them and have a tall set of cabinets with all kinds of drawers now when I first started

building cabinets one of the things that confused me for a long time was how to do the toe kicks and a lot of times

you’ll see people just cut them out of the side of the cabinet I don’t like to do that and I first got this idea from

watching this no-name beginner YouTuber Mark spagnolia I think is his name and

he showed how you just build a different base that’s shallower and so this is what I’m doing here is I’m building my

toekick separately couple of reasons why you want to do this first it’s just a cleaner look and you don’t have to take

a jigsa or a band saw to the sides of your cabinets but most importantly it’s

way easier to level this base and then set all of your cabinets on that then to

cut out toe kicks on each one of your cabinets and then you have to level all of your cabinets individually now my

garage floor slops quite a bit and for a good reason this is actually what you want in case you have an unfortunate

water leak we’re not going to talk about that you want water to drain outside so the way you go about this is with shims

at first all I had was some wooden shims and I didn’t have enough so I was going to have to go to the store and buy some

more and that’s when my friend Jason Bent told me that I should probably get composite shims I asked him why and he

said they’re more consistent and I never thought about the inconsistency of wood shims but he was totally right I may

have overdone it on the shims I call this chapter shim for the shims that

stuck out I just used my oscillating tool to cut them they were pretty easy and like a kid on Christmas I wanted to

see what my cabinets look like so I temporarily plac them all on there and look at that Gap I mean probably most

garages are going to have a gap like this but I will show you a way to fix

this it’s really easy I found this scrap piece of plywood that I brought from my

last house that was living outside at one point and started to grow mold or

mushrooms you can see right there so instead of throwing it away I figured I could just scribe this by placing it

flat on the floor placing my tracksaw on that line and then I just cut it easy I

clamped the other side in place took the offcut scribed it again and with the

magic of YouTube and check this out now ideally you’d probably want to use quter

inch sheet of plywood or something for this but this is all I had so I used my 3M sander with extract sandpaper and I

quickly sanded off what I think was a mushroom fungus growing on this

plywood a little glue and some clamps and maybe slightly one or two extra brad

nails let me know if you go overkill on the brad nails as well pretty awesome if you ask me couldn’t even tell if the

floor was uneven now this end I will fix with a end panel I’ll show you that in a

little bit but man shim City never looks so good and in case we ever sell this

house which at some point we probably will I left a little note here in case someone ever tears this out I want them

to know who’s responsible for this now’s the time that I’ve been waiting for is to finally install the cabinets so I can

get to making stuff now that end does not look great and before I fix that we’re going to clamp all of the cabinets

together and make sure they’re level which they are now I will screw them all together and then after that’s done I

will screw them into the studs going through the stretchers using some shims to make up the difference between the

drywall I don’t know about you but I need more clamps all right so if you have a Keen Eye you probably noticed

that there was some rough drywall repair behind where my upper cabinets are going to go on a whim I cut a small hole to

see if there was any insulation in this part of the garage and there is none and so I wanted to take this time to put

insulation in it so that in the future I don’t have to rip these cabinets out just to insulate this part of the garage

now this is probably not how you want to do it but my dad and I just cut out a section behind where the upper cabinets

would go we slid in some fiberglass bats and then we patched it up you can’t even tell I did anything right a random troll

commented and said I should probably tape and bed the joints for maximum protection but that sounds like a lot of

work so I put a poll on Instagram asking if I should duct tape it or tape and bed it and wouldn’t you know the internet

wants to see more duct tap tape content on YouTube and from an airflow insulation standpoint I don’t really

know if this duct tape is going to functionally do anything for me but the internet decided so let me know what you

think and boy if anyone buys this house and they take these cabinets off they’re in for an incredible surprise now before

I made a single cut I made sure that all my cuts would be behind where my upper cabinets are so that this nonsense would

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like simplysafe now it was time to make the DIY laminate counter which I’ve never done before I noticed some dark

clouds so in order to avoid another I Told You So moment I went ahead and cut

this MDF in half this is a 10t long piece of MDF it was really heavy using

the track saw I was able to just trim off the ends to exactly 10 ft I may have

forgot to turn on the vacuum using the parallel guides again I was able to dial in the exact width that I want this

counter to be which is 24 in and referencing one of the edges I was able to trim both sides of the other side and

then I fli that around and trimmed the other side that makes total sense I’ve

seen a lot of people on social media make their own counters using black for Mica and this was the most stressful

part of the build because this 5×1 12 sheet of black laminant was

$150 and using contact cement you have one shot now I was really worried about

cutting myself with this and I didn’t have a scoring blade so I figured I could probably use my track saww and it

worked out great I even invented this new hop skip track saww cutting method my strategy here was to laminate the

ends on first and then the front edge and then at the very end once I was comfortable I would put the top on I

stared at this piece of laminate for a couple of hours thinking things through watching YouTube videos on how to do it

and I had to call in backup I mentioned to my dad that I was doing this he asked if I wanted help I said sure and he

drove over that night and there’s no way that I could have done this successfully without him it’s a pretty

straightforward process you put contact cement on the back of your laminate and then on your substrate I needed to do

three coats on each you let them dry until they’re pretty tacky as soon as they touch they’re stuck now if you’re

thinking three coats really look at how the this MDF soaks up this contact

cement now in real time I thought it was crazy but looking back at It sped up I am amazed I left the sheets about a/4 in

proud all the way around so that I could come with my trim router which is upside down to show you which way you should

actually do it and cut it now doing this long 10ft piece by myself I’m sure Pros

know a trick on how to do it but there was no way that I was going to do this successfully the first time by myself

and having extra C of hands totally helped also I think I’m going bald

that’s fun welcome to 40 battery change and if you’re ever doing this eye

protection ear protection nose protection this stuff is nasty my dad

brought a file with him that has a name that I’m not allowed to say on YouTube now this is a cool trick that I’ve seen

on social media and I’ve never tried it’s you take painters tape and you make a v on top of your paint can or contact

cement can and then you pour it which makes it way easier but the coolest thing and I’ll show you at the end is

when you pull the tape off your Rim is perfectly clean which means you can resal this for later use I just poured

this straight on the MDF and tried to roll as fast as I can like this is real time I haven’t sped this video up

actually I did speed it up uh but we went really really fast we placed a bunch of these slats on top of the

contact cement after it had dried which would allow us to temporarily place in a

line the laminate top and then one by one from the middle working outwards we can pull the slats and make contact all

the way down now this is my first time doing this and given that it is my first time I think it turned out pretty well

but what the pros say is you start in the middle and then you work your way out to the other sides and after all of

that stress of literally thinking about this all day hoping that I didn’t mess it up cuz it would be a really expensive

mistake it worked out until I went to rout the edges and ladies and gentlemen

I have I think what is either a tip for you or an opportunity for you to tell me

what I did wrong this entire counter turned out Flawless except for the edge

and I think what happened was that I was pushing the bearing too hard but in this shot it doesn’t look like I’m pushing

hard at all but if I’ll show you a close-up here in a moment of some markings that made it all the way around

the edge where the router bit barely cut into the laminate when trimming this

took all evening to do because we took our time I think we ended at about 10:30 at night clean lid check that out that

tape trick is awesome I found some half inch plywood scraps that I placed up against the in

panel that needs to be covered and this Notch right here is for the baseboard I measured roughly where I need to cut out

and I took some double-sided tape made in the USA and I made a temporary fence so that I could take my oscillating tool

and cut this out because I hate jigsaws do you like tear out how’s that tear out

no one will see it I used a file to clean up a couple of the edges so that I could sneak up on the fit I then used

the pencil just to scribe in place where everything went it only took me about 5 to 10 minutes to cut this side panel so

that it would fit perfectly and of course I had to put a special message written in glue on the side of this

panel before clamping it and Brad nailing it in and when I put everything together you don’t see any of the shims

you don’t see the bottom base it matches perfectly with the

counter now I had about 36 drawer bottoms to sand and prep and this was a

very satisfying point of the build where I tested the fit of all of the bottoms

which are also the runners because of how the drawer is designed now one of the goals for this build was to build it

without any hard Ware and I did test out some handle options that would just involve cutting a hole but I didn’t like

them and I really wanted something physical to pull on so I found several 3D printed design options that flexed a

little bit too much and I suspected that they wouldn’t hold up to use so I am

cheating a little bit and I found these metal drawer PES but they’re about $150 each they’re really slick solid and

cheap so this is the part where I put on some headphones and I just went through a pocket hole craze of making all of the

drawer Parts I’m sorry draw it’s pronounce draw now the easiest way that

I found to assemble pocket hole screws is to just put them in parallel clamps

like you would if you were gluing things up and that way you can sneak up on the fit and then just drive the screws home

I’ve tried tons of other clamps and they seem to just never get it quite right let me know if you have found a better

way to assemble lots of pocket screw joints in a different way but for me

right now this is the best thing that I’ve come up with this is the part of the build where a lot of the payoff is

starting to happen because I’m seeing my brain child in real time in reality in

the physical world and things are all working now when it came time to add the

bottoms I was going to make a jig but I thought that this would be the easiest and I just measured Center on one of the

drawers and since all of these sorry draws are exactly the same this works on

all 36 draws there we go with one of the draws marked at Center I just

transferred all the measurements so I could line up the center line that I did in a similar Fashion on all of the

bottoms 36 times rinse and repeat I’m not going to bore you with it the first

couple I did I was really tenative and I made sure I lined it up perfectly and very gently put two clamps on and

flipped it over and as I got comfortable you’ll see how I just adjusted now I’m not using glue on purpose in case I ever

need to repair these basically what I did was I flipped these over so that they’re upside down I put one clamp in

place I lined up that first line I tacked in one side I flipped it around

squared it up tacked that side and then I ran Nails all the way through on the

sides now one trick that really helped is I took a combination square and I measured the distance that the draw

bottom overhangs and I was able to transfer that onto the bottom of the drawer draw and that gave me a visual

reference on where to nail the bottom on here you can see how this really works

now after 35 draws assembled I didn’t miss a nail once and this was the last

drawer draw and as you can see when I turn this over I missed a nail on the

very last one I’m kidding it was perfect I can’t believe it I didn’t shank a nail

one time has that ever happened to you I spent a lot of time thinking about how to handle the handles and while you

could cut out a shape which would look amazing you would have to cut out that

shape twice because this is a false front so with these metal handles that only downside is that there needs to be

a slight recess cut out on the back of the false front so that the false front

will sit flat against the draw front I thought this was going to be a pain but

actually it was really easy setting up a router table that is just a really

simple DIY router table that I made using some stop blocks setting the depth of cut using the hardware itself I was

able to cut out this mortise similar to like you’d see on a door now normally my

perfectionism would get to me and would force me me to cut the short and then

finish it up with a chisel so that all the corners are square but this is week

three of building these it takes a project about 10 times longer when you’re videoing for YouTube I realized

no one is going to see the back of these false fronts and so I just routed them a little bit deeper so that I really

wouldn’t have to take a chisel to square them up I am really pleased and

impressed with how slick these $11.50 metal drawer PES look I know

these are shop cabinets and they’re kind of supposed to be a little sloppy but I can’t stop looking at them I mean I’m

I’m really happy with myself and proud of the work that I did four years ago I bought the plans

for these upper cabinets from fix this build that I love them so much I’m building them for a second time for this

new setup they are the easiest upper cabinets to build I built four units to Ft worth in half a day for under $200 my

favorite part about them is that the inside shelf is half the depth which allows for you to utilize the back of

the doors for storage and if you use an adjustable shelf pin jig you can customize the placement of every

horizontal shelf you put in the cabinet I’ll link to Brad’s video and plans in the good old dbox and here’s a tip for

installing cabinets by yourself if you screw onto the wall a horizontal board like a straight 2×4 if you can find one

then you can trans for the locations of the studs to the back of the cabinets pre-drill for your screws and with one

hand hold the cabinet in place while you screw into the studs now instead of using a temporary ledge like I just

explained I went ahead and installed my plywood backsplash first so that I could use that to set the cabinets on in my

next video I’ll show a bunch of cool shop tool holders that I will screw onto this plywood backer to hold my most used

tools pegboard is for children subscribe if you want to see that now for the six

people still watching I have a secret that I want to let you in on that you’re going to love before I spill the beans

on that let’s see if I failed or succeeded in building these cabinets for under $900 the amount I would have spent

on the cheapest drawer slides alone the cool thing about this design is that a single lower cabinet unit with six

drawers takes one sheet of 3/4 and one sheet of/ in plywood I built six of them

so I needed six sheets of each size of plywood most of the plywood that I bought was the higher grade domestic 3/4

in material for $80 each now while it was basically a dollar more than what I

found at the big box stores the quality of this was so much greater so even

though I spent the same amount I got significantly better material however I bought some of the cheaper import

plywood for $40 to use on the upper cabinets and if I had to do this over again I would have bought that for

everything because it was just as good as the expensive kind just with a lower grade near and I don’t really care about

that if you include the cost of the MDF black laminate drawer PS screws glue

contact cement J roller and this Craig plywood carrier that saved my back I spent a total of

$1,222 182 on the lower cabinets alone I guess I failed the $900 test but it is

cheaper than if I went the bloom route now if I had used the cheaper import plywood instead of the $80 domestic

plywood that total would have come to $981 and I would have been a lot closer to my goal now this was outside of the

scope of this video but as I was building it I decided to build these upper cabinets throw them in there at the tail end and I spent a total of

$221 on those cabinets which included drawer poles and these LED lights so my

total cost for this entire 10t wall of upper lower cabinets with a counter and

LED lights is $1,444 43 now while I technically broke

the budget and didn’t meet my goal it is cheaper than if I were to have built these cabinets and bought all of those

drawer slides all right so here’s the payoff for those of you who are still watching did you really think that I was

going to put duct tape on the drywall heck no when you weren’t watching I

actually tape embedded the drywall seams because I’m not an animal now the cool thing about this is if you look in the

comments below all the people who didn’t watch this end and who are slightly triggered by me using duct tape they’re

probably going to comment about it so if you want a good laugh you can go to the comment section and look for all those people who are roasting me for using

duct tape or praising me for using duct tape and all those people commenting that way you and I will both know that

they didn’t watch to the end and if you’re watching to the end and you see those comments would you leave a comment

and somewhere in the comment use the snorkel emoji that way I and everyone

else will know that you made it to the deep end if you want to build cabinets like these and support the channel check

the link below if you like the vibe join my daddy’s tribe on patreon woo